In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) is a proposal to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons. IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in RFC 1149, a Request for Comments (RFC) issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) written by D. Waitzman and released on 1 April 1990. It is one of several April 1 RFCs.
Waitzman described an improvement of his protocol in RFC 2549, IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service (1 April 1999). Later, in RFC 6214 released on 1 April 2011, and 13 years after the introduction of IPv6, Carpenter and Hinden published Adaptation of RFC 1149 for IPv6.
IPoAC has been successfully implemented, but for only nine packets of data, with a packet loss ratio of 55% (due to user error), and a response time ranging from 3000 seconds (~54 minutes) to over 6000 seconds (~1.77 hours). Thus, this technology suffers from poor latency. Nevertheless, for large transfers, avian carriers are capable of high average throughput when carrying flash memory devices. During the last 20 years, the information density of storage media and thus the bandwidth of an Avian Carrier has increased 3 times faster than the bandwidth of the Internet. IPoAC may achieve bandwidth peaks of orders of magnitude more than the Internet when used with multiple Avian Carriers in rural areas. For example: If 16 homing pigeons are given 8 32GB SD cards each, and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 9320Mbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards.
Read more about IP Over Avian Carriers: Real-life Implementation, Other Avian Data Transfer Methods
Famous quotes containing the word carriers:
“Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead
And his finical carriers tread,
On a hundred legs, the tread
Of the dead.
Rosenbloom is dead.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)